Lunch-Talk: Kurt De Wit

From New Public Management to Public Value. A paradigm shift regarding HE system reform.

Many higher education system reforms in the past decades have been built on the paradigm of New Public Management. However, these reforms have not allowed HE to fully take its value for society into account. In recent years a growing call can be heard to orient the HE sector towards more collaboration, a focus on a larger set of socio-economic objectives instead of on performance alone, less pressure, and more trust and legitimacy. New Public Management has not sufficiently enabled the creation of public value by the HE sector. This talk will discuss the concept of NPM and its characteristics, and the implications it has in HE. It will evaluate NPM and point at its flaws. It will present the concept of Public Value as an alternative. The concept of public value can be used to point at the substantially valuable contribution of HE to the economic, social and environmental well-being of a society; the need for HE to negotiate with all stakeholders within the HE system to arrive at legitimacy and political sustainability, while searching for operationally and administratively feasible, and by that trustworthy, solutions.

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